An Age Ago

Eve,

The first time I see your face is in anger. We’re stranded in the morning light, framed by lilies and lavender, clinging together in the Garden for the last time, cast away from everything we know by the claws of a cruel God. (You were not created for me, just as I was not created from him.) Your eyes are dark brown and your lips look like a refuge. You are the most beautiful woman in the universe, a goddess of love and wisdom. You remind me of a hurricane and your dress’s laces weave together like strands in a loom. You’re angry with me, as always, and your dark hair flows over your shoulders like venom. The rolling hills smell of incense and myrrh. (Some nights, secretly, when Father’s ear is turned from us, I think I’d rather reek of brimstone.)

We are in the age before ages when our love is never known and never remembered.

The second time goes much the same as the first, though this time I meet you in a dirty alehouse and there is no garden here. You don’t look the same, dresses traded for britches this lifetime, raven’s feathers for bronze hair and garnet eyes for thunder. Your voice is deep and low but still lovely and still yours.

You’re not a noble knight, though your ruthless efficiency makes for a lovely assassin. It’s a stark reversal of our previous million lives.

(It almost makes me wonder who tempted whom.)

I work the bar and you come in covered in mysterious dark spots, and if I were a dumber woman, I’d ask questions. I’m not though and we never formally meet but I mess up your drink the first night. You reprimand me sharp enough that I check the mirror for bloodstains. I kissed you once, when I was drunk and foolish. I never see you again, lost to the same curse again, but I never stop thinking of you and the way you wrecked my life so thoroughly with just one glance.

Last comes the chapter in the desert, as every good story has. It starts the same as the last one, ripped from our beds by the rules of physics (or God, both are mysteries.). The pronghorns jump over barbed wire fences and the sun burns our skin like ants in a magnifying glass.

I hate you for the longest time.

It’s a story of anticlimaxes. Of all the things we go through on this journey it’s the little things that matter the most. Sure, there’s box hair dye and haircuts given with nothing more than a rusty steak knife, there’s the metallic scent of blood staining the night irreparably, and running from something far larger than ourselves. There is desire, that terrible, awful desire, that seeps out our pores and smothers us until we are drowning with our eyes open.

(It’s a constant in all these lives, as if He had designed us to be broken, all because we didn’t love our “husband” in the way we were supposed to.)

There are kidnappings and science that is almost more science fiction than fact, but the little things mattered far more.

Like when we sat underneath the stars on the hood of the broken-down Chevy, brought together by cruelty and shared suffering, with two crappy beers in our hands and the universe in our eyes. It’s where we became friends for the first time.

Then at the motel, a terrible vintage Sci-Fi on the television and our fingers dyed from doing each other’s hair in the rust-stained sink. Then the second when we give into desire, into that terrible curse that binds us together for a moment, and for eternity.

It’s one kiss, just one kiss that tastes sweeter than all the fruits in Eden–and we of all people would know–but it damns us just the same.

(It all cuts to black in a maelstrom of gunfire, and as always, I lose you.)

See, we’re here again and maybe for once we’ll get this right. There’s no garden here but there is no Father either.

A pretty girl with dark eyes and dark hair walks into my English class one afternoon.

“And who might you be?” I ask with a leer. The pretty girl smiles.

“I’m Eve,” she sticks out a hand. I take it.

“Lily,” I reply. Her face turns solemn and she looks at me for a long moment.

“Have we met before?” she asks.

“An age ago, I think.”